Bush’s European Roadshow

Feb. 16 - He doesn’t wear pearls and he’s unlikely to be called seductive. President Bush has many qualities but his welcome in Europe next week is never going to match the swoon that met his secretary of state during her own tour of the continent. Without the promise of a piano recital or an address to Parisian intellectuals, can the president charm Europe’s leaders on the first foreign trip of his second term?

It won’t be easy. Setting aside the personal chemistry, both sides have hardly forgotten the series of snubs and grudges that began four years ago when Condoleezza Rice told European ambassadors in Washington that the Kyoto global warming agreement was dead. What followed might be funny if it wasn’t so serious. Did NATO really feel wounded that it wasn’t asked to take part in the war in Afghanistan? Did the White House really try to interfere in the German elections by lashing out at Gerhard Schröder? Does Jacques Chirac really believe in something as obtuse as multipolarity?

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The clearest sign that both sides want to kiss and make up is the extraordinary care that has surrounded this tour. On paper, Bush’s trip is a carefully staged exercise in ego-stroking—the sort of diplomatic massage that the Bush administration is hardly renowned for.

It starts, of course, with the French. White House officials say it was Chirac’s turn to come to Washington since his last visit was three and a half years ago, soon after 9/11. (Bush has traveled twice to France in the last two years.) Citing a busy timetable of domestic travel, the president’s aides couldn’t find time for the French president before the trip to Europe, so they offered a private dinner in Brussels—one that would took place before the real action began and certainly before Bush traveled to Germany. “It was our scheduling problems that prevented [Chirac] from coming [to Washington]. He wanted to come before the trip,” says one senior administration official. “He didn’t want to look like an afterthought.”

That artful piece of geopolitics sets the stage for an intriguing dinner at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Brussels on Monday, America’s Presidents’ Day. The past and future resentments linger on both sides of the dining table. France still feels slighted over Iraq, where its offer to train military police officers has been spurned. And the Bush administration remains deeply suspicious over Iran, where it believes the French are too sympathetic to the regime and too keen to boost trade to put an end to the Islamic regime’s nuclear programs.

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That’s why the White House intends to ignore all talk of multipolarity—Chirac’s vision of a world with multiple superpowers—to focus on points of agreement, like promoting democracy or the Israeli-Palestinian Roadmap to peace. “You’ll hear the president talk about common values,” says a senior aide. “We want to work with the French and the Germans to support these objectives. We don’t want the transatlantic community bickering with each other over ideologies instead of getting on and doing things together.” That includes the French offer to train Iraqi police. “We would be happy to see the French doing that in ways that the Iraqi government would want,” the senior aide says. “It would be great for the French and great for the international community.”

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